Although Emerson's poetry reveals that he regarded life as a tragedy, he also had a belief in humanity, a pride in human life which gave America a brief revival of the nobility of spirit in which it was founded. On this CD, Archibald MacLeish, a distinguished poet himself, reads many of Emerson's be[...]

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so th[...]

In 1939 Columbia University Press published the acclaimed first volume of The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which presented a deeply personal portrait of the real Emerson, previously unknown to the American public. Through these letters readers gained a new insight into the mind of this seminal f[...]

Nietzsche said that he never travelled anywhere without a volume of Emerson's essays in his pocket, while Mathew Arnold described Emerson as 'the greatest prose writer of the century'. It is a remarkable writer who could at once appeal to a man considered a pillar of Victorian society, and to a man [...]

A brilliant essayist and a master of the aphorism ("Our moods do not believe in each other"; "Money often costs too much"), Emerson has inspired countless writers. He challenged Americans to shut their ears against Europe's "courtly muses" and to forge a new, distinctly American cultural identity. B[...]

Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, "was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own." His celebrated essays--the twelve published in "Essays: First Series" (1841) and eight in "Essays: Second Series" (1844)--are here presented for the first time in an authoritative o[...]

Gathers Emerson's writings about nature, beauty, language, idealism, history, love, friendship, art, and men[...]

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well.
Known for challenging traditional thought and for his fait[...]

When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. Yet his most remarkable literary creation-his journals- remained unpublished. Begun when he was a precocious Harvard junior of 16 and continued without significant lapse for almost 60 years, Emerson's journals were his [...]

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the great minds of the mid-nineteenth century. His thoughts and views led the Transcendentalist movement, and his writings--especially Self-Reliance--taught people to "trust thyself" and see how their self-worth was more important than anything else. Emerson on Self-R[...]